Multicarrier technology has been applied or tested in many different fields of communications, ranging from terrestrial uses to satellite communications, and from home networking to broadcast television transmission. Potential advantages of such technology include increased throughput and greater bandwidth utilization. One spectrally efficient form of multicarrier technology—orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)—is already in common use in such varied applications as digital audio broadcasting (DAB), digital terrestrial television broadcasting (DVB-T or ISDB-T), digital television broadcasting for handheld devices (DVB-H), terrestrial and handheld digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB-T/H), digital subscriber line (DSL) for high-bit-rate digital subscriber services on twisted pair channels, and wireless networking under such standards as IEEE 802.11 and 802.16.
A multicarrier system design may be selected from among several different configurations. For example, a single-input, single-output (SISO) system transmits one multicarrier signal, while a multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) system transmits multiple multicarrier signals over the same band and includes antenna arrays at the transmitter and receiver. The modulation scheme to be applied may also be selected from among many different design options. Typically a phase-shift keying (PSK) scheme is used, such as quadrature PSK (QPSK), quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), or offset QAM (OQAM). Typical QAM schemes include 4-, 16-, 64-, 256-, and 1024-QAM.
One example of an OFDM application, Terrestrial Digital Video Broadcast or “DVB-T,” is specified in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute document EN 300 744. The DVB-T specification provides for a 2K mode (with 1705 subcarriers spaced about 4.5 kHz apart) and an 8K mode (with 6817 subcarriers spaced about 1.1 kHz apart), with the multicarrier signal being transmitted over a bandwidth of 6, 7, or 8 MHz. The related handheld specification (DVB-H) also provides for a 4K mode (with 3409 subcarriers). Modulation schemes used in a DVB system may include QPSK, 16-QAM, and/or 64-QAM.
Accurate channel estimation is an important factor in obtaining a low bit-error rate for a multicarrier system. Channel estimation becomes especially important in situations where the channel may be time-varying, such as mobile applications.